Just when you think you have the Google Display Network (GDN) figured out, another pitfall opens that may cause advertisers to generate erroneous spend, resulting in poor performance.

There are a few factors that may cause unqualified traffic, such as mobile devices, campaign targeting, ad copy – but ultimately, I blame the children (but we’ll get to them in a minute).

Our Audience Was Clearly Defined

For a recent GDN campaign we wanted to target parents, specifically moms over the age of 30. Historical purchase analysis determined this was the audience most likely to purchase our product. Our objective was to place ads in front of these moms on the GDN in an effort to get them to click and purchase.

There isn’t a great amount of content written specifically about our product, but we wanted to get in front of moms reading articles related to raising kids (pre-school aged, specifically).

Targeting Was Tight

When managing campaigns via the GDN I prefer a diversified approach. We implemented two strategies to reach our audience.

One strategy was based on content read by our audience (utilizing keyword and topic targeting via the GDN).

Our second strategy was based on user demographics (utilizing age, gender, and cookie-based initiatives such as Similar Audiences).

Most User Engagement Metrics Were Weak

Upon launching the campaigns, we were relatively pleased with the initial click-through rates (CTR). In fact, CTRs were quite a bit higher than our average GDN performance. However, other user engagement metrics were rather poor – to put it nicely:

Average visit duration was half of the site average. Bounce rates were approximately twice the website average. Pages-per-visit was significantly lower than average. Conversion rates barely had a heartbeat.

It was almost as if the website had a horrific stench and people had to get out of there as quickly as possible. Don’t worry, we’ll get to the kids soon.

Tablet Traffic Was Significant

We allowed the campaigns to run for a few days to see if performance would improve or level out, but it didn’t. Once we had a significant amount of data, we dove into our analysis.

The first thing to jump out at me was the amount of traffic generated by tablets. We hit our budget caps every day (we didn’t want to over-spend since sales were initially pretty slow) and approximately 70 percent of our traffic was coming from these devices. We had our mobile bid modifier turned down to -100 percent.

In general, I have found that tablets have weaker conversion rates than PCs. People are getting more accustomed to making purchases via their tablets, but I think these devices are still secondary to PCs and used mostly for browsing, education, and comparison shopping. Tablet usage is still fragmented meaning people use their tablets while doing something else (like watching TV or traveling).

However, in this case, there was a stark difference between devices. Conversion rates on PCs weren’t as strong as they should have been but tablets were a major issue.

Majority of Tablet Traffic Was From In-App Games

Our demographic and cookie-based targeting via the GDN wasn’t necessarily bad. Here is a quick breakdown of a few targeting strategies:

Individuals who were similar to our previous customers (Similar Audiences)Individuals who were shopping for kid-related products (In-Market Audiences)Individuals who had kid-related interests (Interest Targeting)Layered over demographic modifiers. Increased bids for women, decreased bids for men.Layered over age-based modifiers. Increases bids for the over-30 age group, and removed the under 24 crowd.

With these targets we should have been getting in front of our audience with a pretty high rate of success. In many ways, we were.

We dove further into our analysis by looking at placements via the GDN. These placements were generating most of our traffic:

I don’t know about you, but most mothers I know aren’t spending their time looking at pictures of animals, or coloring barnyard pictures, or playing games that teach you how to read. But I bet their kids do. My 3-year-old daughter plays these types of games and uses these kinds of apps all the time.

And this is where the children come in to play. Literally.

Our theory: We got in front of the right people (moms over the age of 30). Our GDN targeting found the right people based on cookies, or browser history, or search query history and that is great.

Basically, our ads had found the right person and device. It was the user behavior that was the challenge.

Sure, when mom was browsing relevant content, our ads appeared – but our ads also appeared when mom would hand their tablet (probably an iPad) over to their kid form some tech-based playtime. I am a case study of one so my research is extremely limited, but my daughter clicks in-app ads all the time. Often I hear, “Daddy it’s not working!” as she is playing Talking Tom. I’m surprised numerous unwanted (and probably inappropriate) items haven’t shown up on my doorstep.

Exclude In-App Ads From Campaigns

We found that the GDN performs poorly via mobile devices in general. When you're creating your campaigns, please be careful with your targeting.

In fact, you should give serious consideration to your GDN device targeting. Unlike the Search Network, you have a great deal of control over devices.

Here are a few quick action items to take within your GDN campaigns in terms of thinking about tablet traffic via the GDN:

Review your device traffic. If tablets are a disproportionate percent of your traffic, then you may have some targeting issues.Review your placement reports. You can find these mobile apps within the Placement Performance Report. Check it out.Remove the In-App game category from your campaign. More than likely, you don’t want any traffic from any games so just go ahead and remove this category. Here's a screenshot of this in-app game category in the AdWords interface:

Remove tablets from your targeting in general. If these devices don’t work well for your campaigns, just remove them totally.Summary

OK, ultimately the children aren't to blame for these faulty campaigns. They are just bystanders innocently trying to play games and accidently clicking on ads. I blame Google.

With the introduction of enhanced campaigns, advertisers are no longer able to exclude tablets from their campaigns (yes, tablets are mobile devices) or target these device in separate campaigns. The data that I’ve provided here support the fact that tablets are not the same as PCs as Google is now proposing with enhanced campaigns.

Within AdWords, campaign managers can target specific devices via the GDN. Actually, the targeting capabilities on the GDN for individual devices are very robust. You can target devices by operating system and device models. You can even target specific versions of each OS.

If you can target these devices, you should be able to exclude them too. But that isn't in Google’s best interest. Here's a screen shot of this settings section within AdWords:

The inability to segment devices means that advertisers are forced to run ads via tablets, even if the performance is terrible. This is bad for advertisers. But it’s good for Google because it increases their profits.

Don’t worry, Google. I still love you. You do most things right. You actually do a lot of good for advertisers and I appreciate it. But in this instance, you're getting a wag of the finger.

Early Bird Rates Expire Soon!ClickZ Live (Mar 31-Apr 3) is a brand new global conference series kicking off in New York City. Over 3 days of sessions, keynotes, training workshops and networking you'll gain invaluable digital marketing and advertising take-aways.Register now and save up to $400 ››*Early Bird Rates expire Feb 21.

Just when you think you have the Google Display Network (GDN) figured out, another pitfall opens that may cause advertisers to generate erroneous spend, resulting in poor performance.

There are a few factors that may cause unqualified traffic, such as mobile devices, campaign targeting, ad copy – but ultimately, I blame the children (but we’ll get to them in a minute).

Our Audience Was Clearly Defined

For a recent GDN campaign we wanted to target parents, specifically moms over the age of 30. Historical purchase analysis determined this was the audience most likely to purchase our product. Our objective was to place ads in front of these moms on the GDN in an effort to get them to click and purchase.

There isn’t a great amount of content written specifically about our product, but we wanted to get in front of moms reading articles related to raising kids (pre-school aged, specifically).

Targeting Was Tight

When managing campaigns via the GDN I prefer a diversified approach. We implemented two strategies to reach our audience.

One strategy was based on content read by our audience (utilizing keyword and topic targeting via the GDN).

Our second strategy was based on user demographics (utilizing age, gender, and cookie-based initiatives such as Similar Audiences).

Most User Engagement Metrics Were Weak

Upon launching the campaigns, we were relatively pleased with the initial click-through rates (CTR). In fact, CTRs were quite a bit higher than our average GDN performance. However, other user engagement metrics were rather poor – to put it nicely:

Average visit duration was half of the site average. Bounce rates were approximately twice the website average. Pages-per-visit was significantly lower than average. Conversion rates barely had a heartbeat.

It was almost as if the website had a horrific stench and people had to get out of there as quickly as possible. Don’t worry, we’ll get to the kids soon.

Tablet Traffic Was Significant

We allowed the campaigns to run for a few days to see if performance would improve or level out, but it didn’t. Once we had a significant amount of data, we dove into our analysis.

The first thing to jump out at me was the amount of traffic generated by tablets. We hit our budget caps every day (we didn’t want to over-spend since sales were initially pretty slow) and approximately 70 percent of our traffic was coming from these devices. We had our mobile bid modifier turned down to -100 percent.

In general, I have found that tablets have weaker conversion rates than PCs. People are getting more accustomed to making purchases via their tablets, but I think these devices are still secondary to PCs and used mostly for browsing, education, and comparison shopping. Tablet usage is still fragmented meaning people use their tablets while doing something else (like watching TV or traveling).

However, in this case, there was a stark difference between devices. Conversion rates on PCs weren’t as strong as they should have been but tablets were a major issue.

Majority of Tablet Traffic Was From In-App Games

Our demographic and cookie-based targeting via the GDN wasn’t necessarily bad. Here is a quick breakdown of a few targeting strategies:

Individuals who were similar to our previous customers (Similar Audiences)Individuals who were shopping for kid-related products (In-Market Audiences)Individuals who had kid-related interests (Interest Targeting)Layered over demographic modifiers. Increased bids for women, decreased bids for men.Layered over age-based modifiers. Increases bids for the over-30 age group, and removed the under 24 crowd.

With these targets we should have been getting in front of our audience with a pretty high rate of success. In many ways, we were.

We dove further into our analysis by looking at placements via the GDN. These placements were generating most of our traffic:

I don’t know about you, but most mothers I know aren’t spending their time looking at pictures of animals, or coloring barnyard pictures, or playing games that teach you how to read. But I bet their kids do. My 3-year-old daughter plays these types of games and uses these kinds of apps all the time.

And this is where the children come in to play. Literally.

Our theory: We got in front of the right people (moms over the age of 30). Our GDN targeting found the right people based on cookies, or browser history, or search query history and that is great.

Basically, our ads had found the right person and device. It was the user behavior that was the challenge.

Sure, when mom was browsing relevant content, our ads appeared – but our ads also appeared when mom would hand their tablet (probably an iPad) over to their kid form some tech-based playtime. I am a case study of one so my research is extremely limited, but my daughter clicks in-app ads all the time. Often I hear, “Daddy it’s not working!” as she is playing Talking Tom. I’m surprised numerous unwanted (and probably inappropriate) items haven’t shown up on my doorstep.

Exclude In-App Ads From Campaigns

We found that the GDN performs poorly via mobile devices in general. When you're creating your campaigns, please be careful with your targeting.

In fact, you should give serious consideration to your GDN device targeting. Unlike the Search Network, you have a great deal of control over devices.

Here are a few quick action items to take within your GDN campaigns in terms of thinking about tablet traffic via the GDN:

Review your device traffic. If tablets are a disproportionate percent of your traffic, then you may have some targeting issues.Review your placement reports. You can find these mobile apps within the Placement Performance Report. Check it out.Remove the In-App game category from your campaign. More than likely, you don’t want any traffic from any games so just go ahead and remove this category. Here's a screenshot of this in-app game category in the AdWords interface:

Remove tablets from your targeting in general. If these devices don’t work well for your campaigns, just remove them totally.Summary

OK, ultimately the children aren't to blame for these faulty campaigns. They are just bystanders innocently trying to play games and accidently clicking on ads. I blame Google.

With the introduction of enhanced campaigns, advertisers are no longer able to exclude tablets from their campaigns (yes, tablets are mobile devices) or target these device in separate campaigns. The data that I’ve provided here support the fact that tablets are not the same as PCs as Google is now proposing with enhanced campaigns.

Within AdWords, campaign managers can target specific devices via the GDN. Actually, the targeting capabilities on the GDN for individual devices are very robust. You can target devices by operating system and device models. You can even target specific versions of each OS.

If you can target these devices, you should be able to exclude them too. But that isn't in Google’s best interest. Here's a screen shot of this settings section within AdWords:

The inability to segment devices means that advertisers are forced to run ads via tablets, even if the performance is terrible. This is bad for advertisers. But it’s good for Google because it increases their profits.

Don’t worry, Google. I still love you. You do most things right. You actually do a lot of good for advertisers and I appreciate it. But in this instance, you're getting a wag of the finger.

Early Bird Rates Expire Soon!ClickZ Live (Mar 31-Apr 3) is a brand new global conference series kicking off in New York City. Over 3 days of sessions, keynotes, training workshops and networking you'll gain invaluable digital marketing and advertising take-aways.Register now and save up to $400 ››*Early Bird Rates expire Feb 21.

Today’s full service ad agency services go far beyond building out creative and determining media placement.

As Lowe Campbell Ewald’s SEO manager, Hillary Glaser is responsible for managing client search efforts, as well as training agency staff and educating clients on the realities of SEO.

At the beginning of every project, Glaser said she meets with other internal team members to get a better grasp of their client’s objectives:

The first thing we do is talk it out � we start brainstorming and collaborating with the analytics teams, account people, and other digital and traditional disciplines to better understand the needs of the client. Then we take our own search ideas, strategize, and circle back with the team. This tactic works really well because it creates a collaborative environment that facilitates the merging of ideas for an overall strategy.

Beyond her responsibilities as a search strategist and analyst, she also assists in helping clients understand what’s involved when it comes to effective search strategies, even when they have a relationship with another search agency.

“We aid some accounts in understanding their SEO counterparts when the client has a long-standing partnership with another company,” said Glaser, “We help teach and guide the agency’s account executives in understanding the reports they are given and what questions to ask of those counterparts.”

Glaser was featured today in an interview on our partner site at Marketing Land, offering insight on her role within the ad agency and how she sees brands failing when it comes to search efforts.

Conferences, symposiums, summits, trade shows, roundtables and world expos. From intimate, invitation-only events to sprawling Las Vegas-style exhibit halls, most of us have attended at least one industry-specific event.

While the business value has been debated off and on over the years, and it was predicted that webinars and other digital forms of online training would eventually replace live events, there is just no substitute for face time when you want to establish rapport with people who share your interests and business goals.

As content marketing strategy continues to gain momentum, an interesting phenomenon is occurring � real-world, in-person events are starting to edge out trendier content tactics, like video. In fact, according to Content Marketing Institute, in-person events have been ranked as the most effective content marketing tactic over the past four years by B2B marketers.

This should come as no surprise when you consider all the pre- and post-event marketing opportunities.

The ability to deliver information in a variety of formats makes real-world events a content marketer�s dream. All it takes is some planning and an understanding of your target audiences preferred consumption patterns.

Content marketing channels around an industry conference or trade show abound, from pre-event storytelling through interviews and articles written by speakers in advance and from live blogging to creating�social media advocates during and afterward.

Optimize and Amplify: Stealing a Page From Lee Odden’s Playbook:

Regular readers of this blog know how generous Lee is with sharing his online marketing expertise. Often, he takes this one step further with a play-by-play of tactics he employs to get the most ROI from many content marketing tactics.

Last year, preceding Content Marketing World�s annual conference, he laid it all out for readers, whether you were attending, speaking or sponsoring. We�ve republished his tips here:

Before the event:

Write headlines, descriptions, tags and make trackable short URLs.Pre-write tweets, updates and decide on a hashtag.Submit your session to event listing sites; create events on Facebook and LinkedIn.Create a contest or buzz around your presentation to inspire others to tell their networks.Issue an optimized press release.Schedule interviews with media attending the event and/or local media.Connect with other speakers in advance.Create a teaser for your presentation.Announce your event attendance through email and your social channels.When you meet people before your presentation, don�t be shy about sharing when you are speaking.Create a check-in notice on Foursquare inviting people to attend your session.

During the event:

Create content the audience can participate with. I like to take photos of the audience and post. to our Facebook page so they can tag themselves.Use tweetable, shareable content in your presentation.Give something away to motivate desired behaviors like asking questions.Always include a report or fulfillment piece in your thank you page.Have someone on your team monitoring tweets and buzz during your presentation. Interact as appropriate.

After the event:

Curate buzz about the presentation into a blog post and/or newsroom post.Follow up on questions asked and fulfillment deliverables.Connect with new contacts through appropriate social channels.Thank the conference for having you.If you were on a panel, thank the panelists and moderator.Thank any live bloggers that covered your session.Use media coverage from the event in your newsroom, corporate email and other communications.Pros of Real-World Events:Builds your brandEstablishes thought leadershipInspires confidence in your employeesCited as a primary source of qualified B2B leads.Drives social media engagement and amplificationMay garner attention of mainstream media and industry bloggersCons of Real-World Events:There are costs involved: travel, event attendance feesTime to plan and/or attend may be make it hard to justify ROIPerceived as a sales tactic and not part of an overall content marketing strategyWhat the Marketing Experts Are Saying:

“As event marketing naysayers continue raising this channel�s disadvantages, more than 4 out of every 10 B2B marketers are tapping into the opportunities from event-based prospecting.” Business 2 Community

“A total of 84 percent of the event marketing executives surveyed believe events and experiential marketing are either �very important/critical� or �important� to their organizations�and driving this perception are sales and revenue.” Expo Web

“When asked to list the top three marketing elements for accelerating and deepening relationships, event marketing led at 64 percent, followed by social marketing at 55 percent and Web marketing at 54 percent.” Event Marketing Institute

Real-World Event Content Marketing Examples:

Ted Talks

Ted Talks grasped the power of content from the start, as evidenced by its mantra: �ideas worth spreading.�

They have developed and executed one of the most highly integrated content platforms aroundNot only does each Tedx showcase their brand, it also establishes its equity and delivers on its brand promiseAt 150 million and growing, they�ve attracted one of the largest army of brand evangelists in the world. See this infographic.

Apple

Apple is another early advocate of face-to-face events, understanding how the tactic would showcase their content.

Seen as the lynchpin of their marketing efforts, eagerly anticipated by management and experienced by every employee in a standing-room-only cafeteriaIt�s not just an event but also a golden marketing opportunity to engage and sustain his target audienceSteve Jobs personally oversaw the content strategy, content creation and integrated marketing efforts to forge deeper, more sustained connections with an audience of both consumers and employees.

Photo credit: Creative Commons

Guidelines for Content Marketing With Real-World Events:

Even if you�re not as big a brand as Apple, you can create powerful content marketing from your organization�s own events or from those you attend. Here�s how:

Record the speaker�s presentation at the event. Most conference organizers are set up for audio, but, as a backup, travel with your own microphone that you can connect to your own digital recorder. Content marketing output: white papers, articles, blog posts, podcasts

Tip: Post the original text transcript along with the audio files, so that the keywords appearing in the content is discoverable through search engines.

Capture the presentation on video. Break down the video into its most relevant highlights. Content marketing output: Create a demo reel and post on website or blog.

Send it to relevant industry thought leaders and journalists. Post on YouTube. Take a still screen shot and use it on your social media profiles establishing yourself as a thought leader and letting your connections know you�re on the speaking circuit.

Tip: A wireless microphone synched to a pickup on the camera will produce a better sound than the camera�s microphone.

Create a graphic representation of the talk. Repurpose the slide deck as a stand-alone, such as a SlideShare presentation which can also be posted to your LinkedIn profile to demonstrate your expertise.

Tip: Include diagrams, photographs or other images that will add clarity to the presentation, since information shared outside of the original context may be confusing. Graphics can also help break up long blocks of text.

Create engaging emails about the event. Whether it�s your company owned event or one you are speaking at, giving event details a prominent spot in your email content will help drive attendance and engagement.

Tip: Plan for event-related content after the conference, such as follow up posts, news mentions, satisfaction ratings or pictures of attendees to generate excitement for your next event.

Treat your speaking calendar as content. Posting event listings where you will be speaking either in an online calendar or as a graphic on your website gives prospective attendees an idea of the content you will be delivering at the event. At the same time, you can show clients or prospects the rich variety and robust quantity of events listed, further establishing your expertise.

Tip: Treat event listings as you would any other piece of content: optimize them for search and announce them across multiple platforms. Include structured data on your events listing page to leverage rich snippets in Google.

The power of attending or hosting real-world events transcends their content marketing value. Meeting people in person adds richness to your online relationships, exposes you to new clients and can lend itself to establishing new alliances.

All businesses have the opportunity to create a content platform and use events to extend and deepen customer engagement. This is the real value and ROI of events.

What have you taken away from the last conference or trade show you attended or sponsored?

If you like in-depth articles like this about content marketing, be sure to visit our index of content marketing tactics.

2013 brought enhanced campaigns – the good and the bad – to search marketers. Plenty of changes have been made on both Google and Bing Ads in the last year as a result. With a long list distractions and optimization ideas let's focus on three simple tactics that can drive quick wins.

Bid multipliersAd group level sitelinksDevice specific ad copy

Let's dive into these PPC power plays.

Bid Multipliers: Move Beyond Bidding 101

Earlier in my career, I worked with a number insurance companies. Terms like "cheap auto insurance" typically went for $50 or more a click. With competition so extreme, every advantage mattered. The savviest marketers realized their conversion rates and average order size varied by time and geography (among other factors).

They used bid adjustments (a.k.a. bid multipliers) to capitalize on these differences in a few ways:

Time: Searchers on Monday and Tuesday mornings typically converted more often and signed up for more valuable insurance policies versus the rest of the week.Location: Insurance policies in specific ZIP codes were worth considerably more than others.

While their competition was bidding $40 all day, these marketers used a base bid of $30, but hit $50 in the morning during their best times and $30 in the evening when conversion rates were lower.

These subtle changes throughout the day drove higher lead volume because they were able to maintain higher positions in peak times, while improving ROI in the slower evenings. Double win.

Last year's mobile bid multiplier dilemma has now left search marketers with the right experience to move beyond bidding 101. Turns out conversion rates and average order size can vary by devices (surprise!). This same analysis can be applied to time of day, days of the week, locations and more dimensions – focusing first on conversion rates as your guide.

A few quick considerations when implementing this strategy:

Remember bid multipliers are multiplicative.Always make a statistically significant decisions.Ad Group Level Sitelinks: Balance Missing Out With Management

Sitelinks can improve an ad's CTR, but they offer more. They also offer searchers a way to self-refine their intent on head terms and engage deeper landing pages, all before clicking on an ad. Too often, marketers are missing out.

Missing out: "Luxury Hotel Las Vegas"

Not everyone is missing out. A number of competitors have created engaging and valuable sitelinks such as "5 Star Hotels", "4 Star Hotels", "Spa Packages" and even "Luxury on a Budget".

Spending 30 minutes thinking through your sitelink strategy can yield results. It's helpful across all industries, here's a great example for retail:

Nailed it: "Mens Dress Shirts"

That said, creating customized sitelinks for every ad group can be considerable work. What matters is starting. Consider experimenting with a set of your highest volume ad groups by conversions and clicks.

Device-Specific Ad Copy

A study from Bing Ads looked 143 million ad impressions from 100,000 search ads in January 2013 for the Education Provider vertical. One of the interesting findings when comparing the top ads across devices was PC users respond to "at-home" in ad copy, whereas mobile users respond more to calls to actions "enroll now" and "learn more."

The fact there was a performance difference between mobile ad copy and PC ad copy isn't a surprise. Just as it isn't a surprise conversion rate or average order size can vary by device type.

The new mobile ad preferences for enhanced campaigns removed the ability to target by device. All is not lost.

Test multiple mobile preferred ads and remember Bing Ads still offers the choice to target mobile campaigns without other devices. Ultimately, targeting devices (and even operating systems) gives you the chance to deliver highly targeted, customized experiences for your customers, which could result in higher conversions.

Conclusion

Taking advantage of these three power play that enhanced campaigns delivered. What other tips and tricks have you seen success with as a result of enhanced campaigns?

Early Bird Rates Expire Soon!ClickZ Live (Mar 31-Apr 3) is a brand new global conference series kicking off in New York City. Over 3 days of sessions, keynotes, training workshops and networking you'll gain invaluable digital marketing and advertising take-aways.Register now and save up to $400 ››*Early Bird Rates expire Feb 21.

On Wednesday/Thursday of last week, Google added a new guideline to their Webmaster Guidelines to “not block a destination URL for a Google Ad product” via your robots.txt file. 24-hours later, Google reversed that guideline and put the webmaster guidelines back to exactly how they were Wednesday morning.

Here was the addition and then what they removed:

Make efforts to ensure that a robots.txt file does not block a destination URL for a Google Ad product. Adding such a block can disable or disadvantage the Ad.

We asked Google why did they make the change and then later, when we noticed the guideline was reversed, why did they reverse it?

We were considering something along these lines since advertising programs (not just ours) often need to crawl the landing pages, but we decided not to add it to the webmaster guidelines. Sorry for the confusion there.

As you may know, Google has told us they want us to make sure ads do not influence the search results and to block ads using the robots.txt file or use the nofollow. In fact, it is one of the existing guidelines:

Make reasonable efforts to ensure that advertisements do not affect search engine rankings. For example, Google’s AdSense ads and DoubleClick links are blocked from being crawled by a robots.txt file.

But then they added this new guideline that communicated almost the exact opposite.

To be fair, Google’s ad ranking algorithm does need to detect landing page quality and thus needs to crawl. But as you can see, this can get confusing when placed in the guidelines.

As you can see, this guideline change and reversal is very interesting. It may have been a complete accident and we shouldn’t bother looking more at it, or it may be two different departments butting heads at the company.

Last week I attended and presented at the SES conference in London where online marketers from all over Europe and as far away as Australia converged to learn about integrated marketing and paid, earned, and owned media.

With it�s history in search marketing, the conference complemented presentations on digital marketing with sessions on SEO as well.

Making sure content is easy to find by the right audience in search is an important part of our consulting at TopRank Marketing, so I am acutely aware of the changes in the search optimization world from Panda to Penguin to Hummingbird. Regardless, as a content and social media focused marketer, it was interesting to hear the shift in current SEO and link building best practices.

In the race to win buyer’s attention through search, I’m pretty sure many social media and content marketers aren’t even aware of, let alone optimizing for, crawling, indexing and combatting against negative SEO and risky links.

Because of Google’s crack down on page and link quality, many SEOs are changing gears and going on a sort of defense to remove negative signals. In fact, negative signal removal is actually a blossoming industry in niche SEO circles, something that is in stark contrast to simply focusing on creating and promoting high quality content that people will want to share and link to.

I thought the most striking public comment was the disclosure by a speaker of having been paid to procure links of a certain type in the past, only to now get paid again to have them removed or disavowed. It’s not exactly �dodgy�, but not exactly honorable either.

One presenter related a story about how an owner of 10,000 or so directories used to charge pennies for inclusion now charges $5 for removal.

Another irony was the claim that Google Webmaster Tools is the logical place to start for signals to determine the SEO health of a website, only to discount the accuracy of WMT data, feature by feature.

Beyond some of the smugness of gray/black hats now doing white hat SEO, there were many useful insights shared regarding the mechanical aspects of SEO audits and the current state of link building. I found the tips shared by Paul Madden – @pauldavidmadden on link building and Andre Alpar – @andrealpar for SEO Mechanics to be particularly useful. In combination with our perspective at TopRank Marketing, here are some of those insights:

Mechanics of SEO – Crawling & Indexing

Most people in the social media and content marketing world focus their SEO efforts on keywords and content or they don�t really consider it at all. But any site with a volume of content, a long history and a fairly competitive market will need to consider the technical aspects of SEO – or lose business to competitors who do.

Search Engines are far from perfect in their ability to find, understand and organize content on the web. It also takes formidable resources for search engines to continuously do this with the explosion of content and links being created every second of every day. As a result, search engines have made some aspects of the crawling and indexing process more explicitly part of what it takes to achieve prominent visibility.

Part of the burden is now on the website owner to make sites easier and more efficient to crawl, (in the name of better user experience). That means your pages need to load fast, be error free and maybe even include extra markup in the code. They need to be �search engine friendly� so it�s easier for Google and Bing to make copies of your content.

When your site complies with these more technical website standards, the rewards can be anything from having more of your content included in a search engine index to an improvement in how your most important content stands out from other search results.

Here are some important considerations for tuning up your website performance, �SEO Mechanic� style:

Crawling Management – There are three essential components to how search engines discover and copy, organize and sort your website content amongst the billions of other documents on the web. They are:�crawling, indexing, and ranking. Without good management of the crawling and the indexing portions of this process, it can be pretty difficult (or random) to achieve and maintain good search visibility across your portfolio of digital marketing assets.

Most content and social media marketers aren’t accountable for the crawling and indexing of the content they create. If they have a SEO consultant, those responsibilities are left to others. Who’s to say whether it’s being managed for maximum marketing benefit vs. pure SEO objectives? i.e. gross “ranking” counts vs. qualitative brand and topic inclusion.

Think if it like this: When you build a house there are many things to decide, but getting the crawling and indexing right is like getting a solid foundation in place for your house. However, different than with a house – you have to manage crawling and indexation efficiency for performance on an ongoing basis.

Crawling the web is difficult, so that means there�s an opportunity for SEOs to make crawling easier and more efficient for search engines. A good SEO mechanic can help focus crawlers where they need to be – what to crawl and what not to crawl.

Andre Alpar says blocking less important URLs from being crawled increases the probability that important URLs will be crawled. �Look at your URLs as sets or layers. Some layers, you don�t want to be crawled including: printable versions of pages, some PDFs, thumbnail versions of images, or alternative sorting and filters pages in ecommerce sites.

Robots.txt and 301 redirects are tools you can use. Parameter handling within Google Webmaster tools also offers some options.

Indexation Management -�Indexing strategy focuses on which URLs are important for users only and which are also valuable for SEO. �Rather than viewing this separation in black and white, I prefer to think of them in order of priority. �Marketing content should not be competing with other content, but it might get priority when it comes to technical and topic optimization.

When you take the approach that some content has search engine priority, you’ll have to decide: Across how many URLs will you focus authority? Andre �says �that the less pages you push in the index overall, the more likely those that you do publish will appear high in the SERPs.

The first step in an indexation strategy: sort through your user-oriented pages. Some URLs are only important for the user and internal linking, but not for SEO. Examples: Shopping cart pages on an ecommerce site, help pages, pagination pages.

Andre says�you don�t want to rank for “help” content, which I don’t agree with at all.

Current customers use search engines to find help information related to products and services all the time and ensuring relevant search visibility can create a great customer experience. Keeping an existing customer should be one of the top priorities for companies as the cost of new customer acquisition is far higher and a lot less efficient investment. �Optimizing for help content means different, more niche terms and should not compete with marketing content. Even so, help content can double as marketing content anyway.

Andre shared these three groups to organize your site’s URLs for steering Googlebot in the right direction using the robots meta tag:

Group 1: Pages good for users and internal links �(Noindex, follow)Group 2: Pages good for SEO and internal links (index, follow)Group 3: Pages good for users, for SEO and internal links (index, follow)

He closed up his presentation with: “The more you focus on Google with its crawling and indexing, the more deterministic SEO successes will become.”

Link Building

There are some that say link building is truly dead and that social signals have replaced the web page to web page links many SEOs have pursued since PageRank entered the online marketing lexicon. Google’s Matt Cutts has recently stated that “We Don�t Use Twitter Or Facebook Social Signals To Rank Pages” which some have interpreted as Google not using links within social content for any part of it’s efforts to understand and sort the web.

That’s a silly interpretation of course, because if you’ve been following people like Matt Cutts for years, you know there’s not only a lot of nuance to his well coached media relations commentary, but also the likelihood that things will change.

Regardless, social networking and community is a content distribution channel that can drive search as well as awareness of content to be linked to. For example, I’ve heard about numerous tools and resources through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google Plus and then linked to those resources from our blog within an article.

Beyond link acquisition is the ever growing need to go on defense with links and win the competition for the most “natural” link profile. Part of that process is to become aware of unsavory links pointing to your site and doing something about it.

Clean Up Those Links – Paul Madden made it clear that the first priority for any site of age that has links pointing to it is clean up. That means an audit of inbound links to your website and evaluating link source quality.

Any spammy, artificial, or low-quality links can hurt your search visibility, so it’s important to get them removed or ignored by Google.��Once you have a good mapping of links to your site, work on getting the low quality link sources to remove the links. This is a LOT easier said than done and will be an ongoing effort for any site of popularity and/or age.

For those link sources you cannot change, disavow them using Google�s tool. The disavow tool should not be used lightly. Using it basically tells Google not to trust any link from a particular domain to your site.

Manage Your Link Profile – Just because you get a few sites to remove unsavory or overly commercial links, doesn�t mean you can stop there. There are a variety of ways that more undesirable links can start pointing to your website from scrapers that copy your RSS feed to negative SEO. For a website that’s even nominally popular, the link profile should be managed and optimized on an ongoing basis.

Again, I don’t think many social media and content marketers are paying much attention to link clean-up. They’re busy creating and promoting fantastic content amongst their communities, often oblivious to automated or sinister linking happening that may become a hole in their bucket for SEO progress.

Paul says “It�s now the person that�s the signal, not just the website.” That means considering the authority and link / share capabilities of individuals vs. solely based on a domain or page. Here are some of his guidelines for “safer” link building:

Do your outreach in an intelligent way. Start with a good site. Follow the links to the community.Think about mining social data for linking opportunitiesFind hashtags specific to an industry and discovery who�s importantForm relationships with influentials. Make the content more important than the linkClean up your link profile and when you�re done, clean it up again. Because you�re never done.Create core content on your own site to define the conceptSpend more time gathering data on who are the influencers in your niche an�use a risk averse outreach to approach them. (In other words, don’t pitch like a common SEO link spammer)Partner with the person not the pageAnchor text is dead -�Don�t use commercial anchor text or sites that use commercial anchor text.Conclusion – But Not the Final Word on this Topic

If you think your website marketing program is doing all that it can to capitalize on being the best answer for buyers at the moment they�re looking on search engines, think again. �Great content� and social network promotion are now the minimum requirements to compete in today�s digital marketplace. As highly skilled auto mechanics assess and fine tune high performance sports cars, experienced SEO mechanics and link building specialists can evaluate, manage and optimize your website�s performance on the search engine racetrack.

Anyone that has been in this race for a while knows it takes a lot more than a nice car (website) to win the race. They also know that the race never ends.

When you hire a digital marketer, think beyond their content and social media marketing skills and see if they can speak “SEO mechanic” and manage efforts like crawling and indexation management. Can they also manage link profile audits, ongoing cleanup and management as well? If your business expects information discovery through search, then these skills are a must – for digital marketing consultants and agencies too.

Are you trying to win the race for top of search by leaving technical SEO and link building to chance? Are you proactively managing past �sins� of SEO or even negative SEO regarding link building and website optimization?

Duane Forrester, Bing’s Senior Product Manager, posted on the Bing Webmaster Blog that you should not be too crazed over picking an expensive domain name for your new web site.

He said, even when you buy old domain names that are pricy, those domain names may have some bad history. Domain names with bad history can actually be a negative and thus less valuable than brand new domain names never used. He recommends you check the Way Back Machine when investigating what content was on the domain prior to buying it.

He also recommends that you don’t spend your whole budget on your domain name for your new website. Duane said, “It�s worth thinking about, and making a thoughtful purchase when you can, but that needs to be balanced against the bigger picture of your business.”

Duane adds, “the point here is that with a bit of creativity, you could find the perfect domain very cheaply.”

Last Friday, a New York Times report on Google+ spotlighted Starbucks and The Economist as two brands currently using Google+ to impact search efforts.

Alex Wheeler, Starbuck’s vice president of global digital marketing, told The New York Times, “When we think about posting on Google+, we think about how does it relate to our search efforts.”

According to the The New York Times report, Starbucks has only three million Google+ followers compared to its Facebook page’s 36 million Likes. The New York Times says Starbucks, “Updates its Google+ page for the sake of good search placement, and takes advice from Google representatives on how to optimize Google+ content for the search engine.”

While The Economist’s senior director of audience Chandra Magee did say journalists at The Economist take advantage of Google+ features like Hangouts, she also commented on how Google+ improves the brand’s SEO efforts.

“There is potential there [on Google+] to help us get in front of new audiences,” Magee told the New York Times, “But it also helps with our SEO strategy because our posts on Google+ actually show up in our search engine results.”

The New York Times reports Google offers brands incentives to sign up on its social media network, giving companies with Google+ profiles, “Prime placement on the right-hand side of the search results, with photos and promotional posts.”

The New York Times says nearly half of 540 million monthly active users on Google+ do not visit the social network. When asked about Google+ integrations and the push-back Google received after it began requiring YouTube comments be made via Google+, Horowitz said, “We are attuned both to what people say and to what people do.”

Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts posted a longer video today answering what it is like to fight webspam at Google.

The questions posed by Brian Harnish of Westminster, California were:

What is a day in the life of a search spam team member like? What is the evolution of decisions in terms of how they decide which aspects of the search algorithm to update? Will certain things within the algorithm never be considered for removal?

Matt spent just under eight minutes answering the question, keep in mind, the average video is about two to three minutes. Here is the video:

In short, Google has both humans who fight spam manually and also engineers who write algorithms to fight spam. The human manual spam fighters handle reactive spam, for the most part, whereas the engineers focus on proactive spam fighting.

Matt explains the best spam fighters look for patterns and trends and try to figure out “what is the loophole they�re exploiting.” Then the engineer would work up an algorithm to expose and cover the loophole.

Most engineers spend their days coding and building algorithms. They often will build something, test it and refine. Then the algorithm might be tested in a live experiment where false positives and other issues might be discovered.

As Matt describes how engineers work, he makes it sound like an art. Where an engineer is not just looking to squash the loophole but creatively look for ways to catch the spam at a deeper level.

Often, the tasks set for the beginning of the day or the beginning of the quarter will change fast. What Google’s engineers set out to do may change based on a major issue or a big complaint from someone or somewhere, that complaint can come internally within Google or externally via a spam report, blogger or somewhere else. So it is a very “dynamic” space,” Cutts said but that also makes it interesting and “very fun and an intellectual problem.”

People will try to spam forever, as Matt has said before – so there is plenty of work and of course, job security. But engineers can work on anything, from existing algorithms to new ones, to making old algorithms faster or better, to building new algorithms for new issues.

“You never want to play whack a mole with a spammer,” Matt said but instead find way to plug a hole.

Demand side platforms (DSPs) are systems built to allow advertisers to bid for display inventory across multiple exchanges in order to run real-time bidding (RTB) display campaigns. Whether they're setting up an in-house RTB team or working with an agency, advertisers must understand which platform best suits their needs before committing to a contract.

With so many DSPs available it can be challenging to determine which platform best serves a company's needs. What are some common inefficiencies to look out for and questions to ask before committing? Consider the following five major factors when choosing a DSP.

Reach

Many demand side platforms will emphasise the reach of their inventory as their key unique selling point. In practice, I've found that of the biggest DSPs the difference in reach is minimal.

The number of websites selling biddable inventory is almost countless, and most DSPs have relationships with the biggest and highest quality exchanges. However, there are a few instances when certain DSPs have access to more desired inventory than others.

Facebook Exchange (FBX), for example, only recently reached an agreement to align with Google's DoubleClick Bid Manager. Prior to this partnership, advertisers using DBM who wished to run RTB on FBX had to do so via another DSP. This meant more work was needed to align reports, frequency cap and de-duplicate conversions.

When choosing a DSP, don't be fooled by the "biggest and best reach" pitch unless you have a specific need for an exchange.

Platform Efficiency

Platform efficiency is absolutely key to running effective RTB campaigns. Some DSPs are investing heavily in their platform and have adapted iterations of their tool to fit the needs of advertisers. This is ideal as even the smallest inefficiencies can cause a lot of wasted time for the team running campaigns.

However as RTB is still relatively new, many tools aren't completely up to scratch. For those inexperienced in biddable media, these DSPs may seem slick and efficient when compared to a more basic tool for ad serving.

For those of us familiar with tools like Google AdWords, whose GDN offering and platform efficiency has been refined for many years, RTB platforms can comparatively be clunky and slow. Hope for efficient platforms is not lost.

As competition between DSPs heats up efficiency will improve and DSPs will tailor to advertisers needs. Advertisers and agencies need to push back on the engineers of the tools and demand that platforms to be easy to use for reporting and optimisation.

Support

You also must consider the level of support provided by the platform. Support can come in many forms.

For new advertisers, support on setup of campaigns may be needed. More experienced teams will likely still find the need for technical assistance at some point.

Advertisers must understand whether there is a cost associated with support, or if a limit to frequency of support is in place.

While the level of support needed may not be obvious from the start, understanding how frequently the DSP is updated and how quickly they're able to respond to advertiser feature requests or technical needs is very important to consider.

Platform Costs

Each platform will have costs associated with running RTB campaigns. These are often variable, based on the amount of money being committed to be spent through the system.

Typically the platform fee is included as a percentage of an advertiser's CPM bid. Agencies also often have a chance to add a charge within the platform which can get hidden within the CPM.

Many DSPs also require a minimum monthly or annual spend in order to either sign an agreement or maintain the original platform fee rates.

The key is for advertisers to and understand what percentage of the total CPM cost is actually going to the inventory bid, and how much this can impact return on investment goals.

Data

You've no doubt heard a lot about how important data is to digital marketing, as "data management" and more specifically "big data" have become buzzwords as of late. However, what I'm focussing on today is the ability to use third party data audiences to prospect to relevant audiences within RTB campaigns.

Advertisers understand which third party data providers are already aligned with their short-list of DSPs and identify how likely these providers are to have data partnerships which will suit the campaigns' needs.

Similarly to boasting about reach, many DSPs will highlight the number of audience segments are available for purchase within their platform.

While a big range is usually important for the "test and learn" process of RTB campaign optimisation, the important thing for advertisers is how big the reach is for the audiences which are most likely to convert for them.

Summary

The above five points are key when choosing a demand-side platform for your team and business needs. Real-time bidding is built to be an efficient and fully optimizable way of running display campaigns. This can absolutely be achieved with an appropriate team in place, and very importantly with a demand-side platform capable of catering to advertisers' needs.

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Infinite scroll is what you see on a lot of newer style web sites such as Pinterest, Google Image search results, many landing pages with a lot of products on a single page and other methods. Google’s John Mueller, Maile Ohye, and Joachim Kupke wrote a blog post explaining various techniques to make those types of pages more search engine friendly.

The issue with infinite scroll pages is that web crawlers cannot always emulate the human user behavior, such as scrolling down a page to load more items. If a web crawler cannot access your content, i.e., the content as you scroll down, you likely will not see that content in the search results. Google said that in order to “make sure that search engines can crawl individual items linked from an infinite scroll page, make sure that you or your content management system produces a paginated series (component pages) to go along with your infinite scroll.”

Faceted Navigation

Faceted navigation is when the navigation changes on a page based on the filtering options offered by the web site. This is often seen on large e-commerce sites that let you filter products by color, size, price, and other specifications.

Google’s Maile Ohye and Mehmet Aktuna said faceted navigation is “often not search-friendly since it creates many combinations of URLs with duplicative content.”

They go on to explain techniques to communicate to Google what content is duplicate, how to find all the content within the faceted navigation and the use of nofollow, noindex, robots.txt and canonical tags to go about this.

Creating quality content for websites is always a hot topic. Part of that naturally is ensuring that your content has good readability, is somewhat grammatically correct, and gives users what they are searching for.

But if users contribute comments to your website or WordPress blog, and those comments aren't necessarily grammatically correct or don't have a high readability score, can this hurt your rankings? Matt Cutts from Google has the lowdown in his latest webmaster help video.

"I wouldn't worry about the grammar in your comments. As long as the grammar on your own page is fine ... there are people on the Internet and they write things and it doesn't always make sense," Cutts said. "You can see nonsense comments on YouTube and other large properties and that doesn't mean that YouTube video will be able to rank."

It is worth noting that he states nonsense comments, and not spam comments. All spam comments should be removed from any website for SEO reasons as well as just overall site quality and user experience.

"Just make sure that your own content is high-quality. You might want to make sure that people aren't leaving spam comments, if you've got a bot, then they might leave bad grammar," Cutts said. "But if it's a real person and they are leaving a comment and the grammar is not slightly perfect, that usually reflects more on them than it does on your sites, so I wouldn't stress out about that."

So just ensure your website is producing great quality content and don't worry about whether any comments are grammatically perfect.

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